Ahaha, nice positive spin there. We have no GameCubes to sell because we aren't making enough, hurray!

oh i thought this story was about how gamecube ditched it's loyal underground fans by accidently getting a popular song so now all the angsty music fans hate it cause it's sold out

I hope they come back with a new deal attached to them. A new collectors disc of obscure and rare titles may help keep sales booming

This is pathetic. Of course when you stop making them you're gonna run out. This is all a cheap marketing ploy to make the Gamecube seems more appealing than it is, much like Sony did when it under-produced the PS2 at launch.

It isn't just building demand. That is suicide when you have two other major competitors. Especially with todays casual gamer who barely knows the difference between consoles. Nintendo was making too many GCNs and not moving any so they had no space for them AND they were putting all their money into non-liquid form. Bad move for any business. So they stopped production. It sounds like Nintendo was planning a price drop since Summer but they probably wanted to play that trump card right around the holidays. They thought they probably thought they were just going to clear out their warehouses but underestimated the power of Black Friday (US) and the whining child.

I don't want to sound negative (I very much like seeing someting mentioned positively in the mainstream news), but this isn't a new development. Maybe not even a good development.

The GameCube sold out halfway through December. Nintendo had bragged about selling a million units in December, and then Microsoft bragged about selling a million of their own, and the fact that they managed to beat Nintendo by a rate of about "1/2 million to zero" for the last two weeks of December.

January hardware numbers were:
PS2: 338,000
GBA: 299,000
Xbox: 192,000
GCN: 131,000

I've seen units arriving and moving quickly at some stores in my city, but other stores are still sold out.

Nintendo supposedly said a while ago that they can produce 1/2 million GameCubes-per-month.

We're gonna need to see some February hardware numbers before we know if this month's "sold out" is a good thing, or a still-lingering bad thing.

i swear that a bunch of monkeys are running nintendo.

how can you not have systems to ship to stores? nintendo deserves to be in third place with stupidity like this.

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Originally posted by: Ajguy
This is pathetic. Of course when you stop making them you're gonna run out. This is all a cheap marketing ploy to make the Gamecube seems more appealing than it is, much like Sony did when it under-produced the PS2 at launch.

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nintendo started production up again a long time ago. if they are almost sold out, its not because nintendo stopped shipping, (well it is possible, but its not related to when they stopped production last year) but because the cube is selling a lot. nintendo is catching up with the xbox in north america, and it is defnitely in 2nd place over all world wide. despite that, i think a shortage is a bad thing. i do not feel that people are buying cubes for their games so much as for its cheap price, if they arent even in stock, people wont say "o the cube is so popular...i want one even more now". they will probably just not get one. thats my feeling anyway. hopefully i am wrong.

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nintendo started production up again a long time ago.

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I am very dissapointed. I thought you guys are Nintendo fans?! You guys trash talk Nintendo more than an XBox site!!! Way to go, ye "loyal" fans }

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Originally posted by: Cap
i swear that a bunch of monkeys are running nintendo.

how can you not have systems to ship to stores? nintendo deserves to be in third place with stupidity like this.

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Video game wise I agree with you, UJ, but Nintendo has always been a business. A great business. But lately their business decisions are bordering on stupid. If you knew you were dropping your console's price 50 USD under your competition (Iwata commented that he thought about doing it in the summer but went for the packaged GBP instead, which is about 3-4 months to up production, rent out space, etc...), you should be prepared to stock and restock stores. Maybe it is not entirely main NCL's fault. Somebody American needs to tell them about Black Friday and it's huge potential.

Amen Campbell, Juan.

"oh i thought this story was about how gamecube ditched it's loyal underground fans by accidently getting a popular song"

Nintendo has the opposite problem. They're losing their loyal underground because they aren't popular. They were mainstream and are becoming underground. It's like if Elton John became underground.

"I hope they come back with a new deal attached to them. A new collectors disc of obscure and rare titles may help keep sales booming"

No thank you. I don't need another obscure disc that's impossible to get or requires me to register a bunch of other titles. If they made it available in stores then sure but you know they wouldn't. Nintendo f*cked it's loyal fans with the first disc and made us jump through hoops for the second. They can take any other bonus discs and shove 'em. However I do think that an exclusive pack-in disc for the N5 launch would be a good idea. It would reward hardcore fans and encourage early-adopters. That's a different topic though.

"I am very dissapointed. I thought you guys are Nintendo fans?! You guys trash talk Nintendo more than an XBox site!!! Way to go, ye 'loyal' fans"

We talk trash because the Cube is greatly underperforming sales wise (even with the price drop) and it SHOULDN'T. There's no reason other than Nintendo's incompetence for the Cube to be where it is right now. This time there was no limitation in the hardware to hold them back. They would have been sitting pretty if they learned from their mistakes but they didn't and they haven't and we'll continue to, in my opinion, justifiably b!tch until they do.

Anyway getting back on target this is kind of good news kind of bad news. The good news is that this is MUCH better than the previous situation where stores couldn't pay people to buy Cubes. However it sucks that if someone wants a Cube they can't buy one and that's a potential lost sale right there. Some of you have said that it worked for Sony. It worked for Sony because they were coming off the massive success of the first Playstation and their only competition was the Dreamcast which most people had ignored anyway. The Cube is the loser console in the US (or at least it's percieved as such) so the demand isn't sufficient enough for a shortage to do anything but damage. No one's paying big money to buy a Cube on Ebay.

Nintendo GameCubes are selling so much? PS2s are selling more (as usual), and there's no shortage of them. Xbox and GCN sold pretty much the same amount in the holiday season, and Xbox is outselling GCN this year, yet there's no shortage of Xboxs. Geddit?

Edit: What Ian Sane said *nods head*

Both MS and Sony probably have larger manufacturing plants to service the NA market. One cannot blame Iwata for underestimating the effect of the price drop. Hell, we always thought the image was what held people back, not the price. Overproduction would have been much worse for Nintendo than the current underproduction.

And, errrm, do people really buy another console just because the one they wanted was sold out? I have serious doubts about that. The GC is a LOT cheaper than the competition, that difference cannot be neglected (so a mother won't buy an XBox for her child instead of a GC, as the XB is twice as expensive), the differences between the consoles aren't neglectible either, since each has its own library. Not even children will change their oppinion, when I was a child I always wanted that one brand, not a replacement (my mother regularly tells me what a nightmare it was when I wanted something and it was sold out, they had to run from store to store...).

If Nintendo were really as "stupid" about manufacturing and supply as some label them, then how is it that they supply enough GBA's for the North American market? I think Nintendo is just being conservative with the Gamecube due to it's fairly unpredictable sales path. Like KDR said, overproduction would be worse than underproduction, especially when you can make the same $99 by selling a GBA SP. I don't think a 60,000 unit advantage in January means that Xbox has exploited some kind of "mistake" by Nintendo. Looks to me like the same back-and-forth kind of sales growth that both systems have been experiencing lately. It's interesting to me that the success of the GBA is usually taken for granted, as if the management of Nintendo had a guarantee that it would sell to the public and it's really the Gamecube that determines whether they are "smart" or "stupid" regarding selling/supplying a product.

the sales numbers for the gc havent been so high that they should be out of systems. someone mentioned in the thread in the gamecube section about the shortage about how nintendo never planned to do any better than ms this holiday season, and it must be true seeing how they never even had enough stock to outsell them. the sales numbers that i've seen for november and december werent that much higher than the xboxs, and the numbers i've seen for january put gc back into third place in sales. where are all these systems? i havent seen a huge spike in sales in europe or japan lately, it just doesnt make sense to me.

i just dont think this should have happened and it just seems plain stupid in my opinion.

and i think everyone knows the gba is successful. the gamecube however has been having problems, and it isnt going to get any better if noone can find a console on the shelves.

DevAdvocate: I think the simple answer to why we all criticize GameCube sales is because it's the weak link in Nintendo's hardware. People prefer to worry about what's going wrong rather than applauding what's going right, and so I think some would agree that Nintendo isn't necessarily stupid in general, just with respect to the GameCube.

For that matter I don't think that Nintendo is all that stupid with the GameCube. It is a little questionable that they keep running out of hardware, but I think we have to see February sales to decide how bad it is. Otherwise, I think Nintendo is fighting an uphill battle and doing pretty admirably. To expect Nintendo to magically remove PS2 from it's entrenched first place position is not really fair. In the 80s, Sega could have given away Master Systems and the NES would still have held first place. Everyone thinks Nintendo should be doing more, but what is that "more"? I don't know.

they mostly want them (Nintendo) to go back in time when they were the dominant force in installed base, despite most who bitch and moan being apart of the 'playstation generation' (i.e. started on n64 or psx)
The internet has given the people a voice, and aparently everyone wants to use that voice to bitch about their favorite past time, beit video games, movies or what ever. (nice bastardised Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back quote there)

"And, errrm, do people really buy another console just because the one they wanted was sold out? I have serious doubts about that."

I know people who have a PS2 and only own non-exclusive games like Madden and Tony Hawk. And they think those are exclusive games. Had they done any research they could have bought a cheaper Cube or and more powerful Xbox and got the same games. I also once saw a man brush off his son's praise for SSBM and suggest he get the Scorpion King instead. And let's not forgot the people who think that every Cube game is made by Nintendo and every Playstation game is made by Sony. Never underestimate the stupidity of people.

Yes, but that doesn't show people buying another device just because of supply shortage. There's a difference between thinking milk comes out of the bottle and buying orange juice because milk's out.

"I also once saw a man brush off his son's praise for SSBM and suggest he get the Scorpion King instead. And let's not forgot the people who think that every Cube game is made by Nintendo and every Playstation game is made by Sony. Never underestimate the stupidity of people. "

Lack of knowledge, and stupid, are very differant things. This I believe is truest in the video game sector. People just dont know, and this is mostly because they dont care, and have no desire to know. They simply want to play games for entertainment. They dont read reviews, they have never heard of a console war, and nost dont even know that Tony Hawk is a real guy. All this is because they simply dont put any stock into video games, they are simply toys, just another form of entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. Having shelves full of PS2's and x-box's while the gamecube shelf sits empty is very bad business. Many people who see this will simply assume that Nintendo is done, that they dont sell gamecubes anymore, that is if they even knew about them in the first place. Shelves need to be stocked, advertising needs to be constant, and then, and only then will any of this matter.

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Lack of knowledge, and stupid, are very differant things. This I believe is truest in the video game sector. People just dont know, and this is mostly because they dont care, and have no desire to know. They simply want to play games for entertainment. They dont read reviews, they have never heard of a console war, and nost dont even know that Tony Hawk is a real guy. All this is because they simply dont put any stock into video games, they are simply toys, just another form of entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. Having shelves full of PS2's and x-box's while the gamecube shelf sits empty is very bad business. Many people who see this will simply assume that Nintendo is done, that they dont sell gamecubes anymore, that is if they even knew about them in the first place. Shelves need to be stocked, advertising needs to be constant, and then, and only then will any of this matter.

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Just check this out...

http://www.gamesarefun.com/gamesdb/editorial.php?editorialid=4

... this is the first in a series of editorials concerning the recent trend in bashing Nintendo.

lol i wish nintendo wasnt T3h doombed!!11!!! but where there is smoke there is fire, and nintendo doesnt seem to be reversing any of their current negative trends. they still have a kid image, they still have poor 3rd party support, and they are still doing dumb htings like running out of cubes!!! i hope they dont fail, but htey probably will. WHAHHAHAHA

Hm, they're maturing their most kid-friendly franchise (Pokemon), their 3rd party support is pretty good in Japan and they're giving their best to keep the GC in stock. So that was sarcasm, nolimit?

"their 3rd party support is pretty good in Japan"

who gives a sh*t, I dont live in japan, and it is one hell of a drive to get a game or two.

"they're maturing their most kid-friendly franchise (Pokemon)"

this means absolutly nothing. It will still be considered kiddie because it is pokemon.

"Hm, they're maturing their most kid-friendly franchise (Pokemon)"

And kiddying up Zelda in exchange. So, um, what's the strategy there? Turning off the demographics that used to support those game doesn't make any f*cking sense to me. I'm LESS interested in the new Pokemon game because of the this more "mature" slant. Pokemon's the cartoon, Zelda's the kid-friendly fantasy title that appeals to adults as well. Not the other way around.

Funny, some people think Nintendo is dying and doing everything wrong, yet Nintendo is making more of a profit than one of the "mature" consoles, and is doing pretty darn well against the other one. Isn't that called success? Oh well, some people...

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Originally posted by: Oldskool
Funny, some people think Nintendo is dying and doing everything wrong, yet Nintendo is making more of a profit than one of the "mature" consoles, and is doing pretty darn well against the other one. Isn't that called success? Oh well, some people...

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cubedcanuck: I meant developers in Japan, not japanese releases (though those are more, as well). They have a lot of big japanese dev houses on their side, but the american ones (especially the bad ones) are leaving them as an excuse for their bad stock (which, ironically, fell even lower after they left...).